For this year's Thanksgiving in America, we offer again discounted licenses for our MBS Plugins for FileMaker and Xojo.
Please use coupon code
BlackFriday for our web shop to order new licenses with a 20% discount. This includes DynaPDF and LibXL.
Order MBS FileMaker Plugin Order MBS Xojo Plugins Order LibXL
If you have special needs, you can email us to get an invoice or Paypal payment link directly. We know some people need to wait till next week to order, so the offer is valid till Tuesday.
Second if you have purchased previously an individual MBS Xojo Plugin part from the Complete Set within the last two years, but not the whole set, we offer you an upgrade to the Complete set for the update price. Please consider to get the whole collection of over 40 plugins instead of just one plugin.
See also
Xojo Thanksgiving Sale,
piDog sale,
xDev Magazine and xDevLibrary sale.
Please check the Claris™ Engineering Blog with a lot of interesting articles. Just recently they added one for a security fix in FileMaker Server 19.4:
- Mitigating XXE vulnerabilities with the FileMaker 19.4.1 update (November 19, 2021)
- Best practices for importing SSL certificates using the FileMaker Admin API (November 16, 2021)
- Split menus for FileMaker Pro on MacBook Pro computers with Liquid Retina XDR displays (November 16, 2021)
- Protecting FileMaker Admin Console port 443 from brute-force attacks (November 16, 2021)
- Managing and maintaining FileMaker Server with the CLI (October 5, 2021)
- Integrating FileMaker custom apps with Slack (September 3, 2021)
- Deleting interactive container cache files (Windows) (August 11, 2021)
- Working with centralized logs in FileMaker Server (June 30, 2021)
- Enabling plug-ins for FileMaker Data API in FileMaker Server (June 24, 2021)
- Claris FileMaker 19.3.1 Platform bug fixes (June 23, 2021)
As you may know Americans love to shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This year Black Friday is 26th November. About half our customers are in North America, so we are happy to offer you a discount if they buy this weekend. Our offer will go live in the next days and should be available in time.
We plan to offer coupon code
BlackFriday for the web shop with 20% off for new licenses of MBS Plugins, DynaPDF and
LibXL.
Updates are already offered with discount (usually 50%) compared to new purchases and and our academic prices already have a discount, too. If you like, you can email us to get an order link for all licenses you need or provide an invoice if needed. Especially if you like to use Paypal for payment, we can provide a link with discount or write a custom invoice.
Order MBS FileMaker Plugin Order MBS Xojo Plugins Order LibXL
As usual the discounted offer allows you to buy whatever licenses you may need in the next year. Especially if your license expired in 2020 or before, this is a great chance to get up to date!
If you need a license from
Xojo Inc. or their third-party store section, you may to check the
Xojo store on the weekend. Everyone interested in a license for the current version 2021r3, should go and buy one. With a current license for iOS (Mobile) or Xojo Pro, you can enter Android testing.
You have a question? Please don't hesitate to contact us by email or phone. We may help to point you to the right offer.
On the Xojo forum was a discussion about the inline If vs the block If syntax in Xojo. Basically whether
result = if( value > 2, 123, 456
is faster or slower than
if value > 2 then
result = "123b"
else
result = "456b"
end if
And the answer is of course: it depends. It depends on what is exactly done and how much compiler optimisation eliminates test code. Like if you do a compare in a loop running one million times, the compiler may detect that the result doesn’t change and only run it once. Also if you assign a value to a variable and then compare that, the compiler may know the result and skip the compare.
So let’s deep dive into the assembly.
(more)
Marc Zeedar announced his offer for the week:
November 2021 – xDev Magazine and xDevLibrary are delighted to announce that through Nov. 29 (CyberMonday) their entire stores are on sale at 20% off!
Just use coupon code CYBERMONDAY to get the discounted price during checkout.
For xDev Magazine, this means 20% off subscriptions, renewals, books, bundles, and more! The only limitation is the minimum order amount must be at least $25 and already-discounted bundles (such as the popular “Welcome to Xojo” bundle) are excluded.
xdevmag.com/orders.shtml
For xDevLibrary, you can save 20% on all digital books, articles, tutorials, and more – everything offered on the store! Just use coupon code CYBERMONDAY to get the discounted price during checkout.
This is a once-a-year sale, but it only lasts through CyberMonday (November 29, 2021). Hurry to take advantage of the great deals!
Also
Strawberry Software offers a discount for renewals within the LiveBoat app and for MBS we offer 20% on new licenses with coupon code BlackFriday.
In MBS Xojo Plugins 21.5 we got 29 new desktop controls to match our existing desktop controls. So whether you use 2021r3 or older, you can always use our controls:
The desktop versions are exactly the same as the normal ones, but with different super class. They derive from DesktopUIControl instead of RectControl.
Check them out!
Especially if you need modern browsing on macOS or Windows, our WebView controls can help. Otherwise enjoy showing map views, camera view, 3D scene or PDF content.
As you may know the
FileMaker Soup is a community organized forum for English speaking Claris FileMaker developers to support each other. The forum is run by a non-profit organization of volunteers elected by forum members.
Currently the Soup runs a
Christmas Funding Drive to gather the $1500 CAD to run the forum for another year.
MBS just donated money to fund the forum for 2 months by donating $250 CAD.
We hope a few more users of the forum can make a donation, even if it's just $20 and
donate via Simplyk.
Xojo Inc. just announced their 10 day BlackFriday sale:
The Last Xojo Black Friday Sale - Save 20% storewide through November 29th
I'd like to add some details:
- Due to how the licensing works with Xojo, every licensee can just go and order an update. The expiration date will be adjusted to add the new year on the end, so even if your license is still good until 2022, you can extend and benefit from the discount. This should even work for more than one year.
- Third party products are included, so you can order some third party products along your Xojo license.
- Buying a XDC ticket gives you a discount coupon to give to a colleague to have them order a ticket, too.
- The reason they announced this to be the last sale on Black Friday is simple: Sales staff likes to enjoy family time. So instead of customers calling all day asking for help with placing their order, the sales staff can enjoy Thanksgiving next year. There will still be sales, but in other weeks of the year.
- Since Android is now in testing, you could get a license and play with it. Be assured that there is a 90-day money back guarantee, so Xojo Inc. can refund you if you are not happy.
For MBS, we match the offer of course. If you are interested in a new MBS Plugin license, you can get 20% off for our licenses (plus DynaPDF and LibXL). An announcement will follow next week. The coupon code
BlackFriday can be used in our web shop. Otherwise email us for custom invoices or Paypal links with the discount.
The new Xojo release showed up and it brings us over 130 bug fixes, 40 changes and and a few new things. While part of the team is hard at work for Android to come in a later release, other engineers had plenty of time working on a lot of little things:
- We got an update on the WebKit library for Windows, so a few websites may no longer complain about older browser engine.
- The PDFDocument class learned a few more tricks like transparent colors and form fields.
- Windows got a kind of dark mode. While Win32 doesn't really support it, Xojo got a lot of custom drawing code in to realize it.
When the Windows framework gets rewritten with modern UI controls in the next years, it will go native for dark mode. See Roadmap.
- You can now build MacOS apps on Windows and Linux. This once again makes Xojo a real cross platform tool again for desktop. Still customers will need a Mac to do testing, code signing and notarization.
- The Crypto module got new functions for Blowfish, Twofish, AES and CRC functions.
If you needed this before, you had plenty of choices with several plugin and declare libraries. The plugin still may offer more and do it threaded.
- Some bigger companies may be happy to see iOS Enterprise signing works now.
- The OSHandle data type for declares sounds handy to avoid conversion between ptr and Integer for handles. But since it's implemented as an extra class, I prefer to do a cast if needed or just change the declare to take integer/ptr instead of using a new class.
- Running Xojo inside Windows for ARM sounds great. Seems to work fine for my copy of Windows 11 on MacBook Pro within Parallels.
(more)
Nickenich, Germany - (November 16th, 2021) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce
MBS FileMaker Plugin 11.5 for macOS, iOS, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin currently available for Claris FileMaker produce line. As the leading database management solution for Windows, macOS, iOS and the web, the Claris FileMaker Pro Integrated Development Environment supports a plugin architecture that can easily extend the feature set of the application.
MBS FileMaker Plugin 11.5 has been updated and now includes over 6600 different functions, and the versatile plugin has gained more new functions:
For this release we rewrote our
WebView functions to work with WebViewers using Microsoft Edge/Chromium as engine. To use the new plugin functions, you need the upcoming FileMaker Pro in version 19.4. On the way we got a
WebView.ShowDevTools function to show the inspector and new preferences for
WebView.SetPreferences function. If you still need Internet Explorer, you can use
WebView.CreateWithControl function to create a plugin based WebViewer with this older engine.
Our new
WebHook functions allows you to run a tiny web server right in FileMaker Pro, Server or iOS SDK based app to catch callbacks from web services. Whether your phone systems, the door bell or your git server sends a web request to notify you about an event, our plugin may receive the request and trigger a script. We support TLS 1.2 with your own SSL certificate and various options.
For DynaPDF we have a new
DynaPDF.GetPDFVersionEx and
DynaPDF.GetInPDFVersionEx functions to provide details on the PDF version of an import or the working PDF. We improved our
DynaPDF.ConvertStyledText function for styled text to better handle fonts and do double underlined text. The new
DynaPDF.AddButtonImageEx2 function lets you pass image data directly from a container value to a button control on a PDF.
Our
hotkey functions got rewritten for macOS to allow local hotkey which don't interfere with global ones. Great to define custom hotkeys for use in the Script Workspace.
The FileMaker enhancements for macOS in our plugin learnt some new tricks: The relationship graph search now initializes on first click to let you open the dialog quicker. We can now have tags to colorize specific words in a calculation and have comments color in special color based on the first word. When you show script IDs, we optimized the performance for users with script folders.
We implemented
WebView.CallFunction for macOS and iOS in addition to Windows. For MapKit we got
MapView.CoordinateForPoint and
MapView.PointForCoordinate functions to translate between on screen points and coordinates on the map. The new
XML.ItemRefs function helps to achieve higher performance when walking through array style XML data.
Finally we updated CURL library to version 7.79.1, DynaPDF to 4.0.63.161, LibXL to 4.0 and SQLAPI to 5.1.7.
See
release notes for a complete list of changes.
Nickenich, Germany - (November 16th, 2021) -- MonkeyBread Software today is pleased to announce
MBS Xojo Plugins 21.5 for macOS, Linux and Windows, the latest update to their product that is easily the most powerful plugin collection currently available for Xojo.
MBS Xojo Plugins have been updated and now includes over 2900 classes and 73,000 documented features, and the versatile plugins have gained more new functions:
Since Xojo 2021r3 introduces new Desktop controls, we updated our own controls for this change. Whether you use Window or DesktopWindow, in both cases you can enjoy one of our 29 controls. The plugin have been updated to the new plugin SDK and we updated our Chromium classes to the newer version used in Xojo now.
Our XL classes for using LibXL to edit Microsoft Excel documents got updated for the version 4.0 of LibXL. This includes a new
XLFormControlMBS class to work with form controls on a sheet.
We improved our support for WebView2 on Windows with a NewWindowRequested event to catch the case when a link should open in a new window. Your application can create a new window and return the reference. The new
WebView2WindowFeaturesMBS class provides details for the new window.
For DynaPDF we have a new
DynaPDFVersionInfoMBS class to provide details on the PDF version of an import or the working PDF. We improved our ConvertStyledText function for styled text to better handle fonts. The new AddButtonImageEx2 function lets you pass image data directly for a button control on a PDF.
On Windows our plugin uses preemptive threads for MT methods with a thread pool. The pool can now be configured if needed with the
WinThreadPoolMBS class. Our
NSURLRequestMBS class can now set attribution for macOS Monterey to define whether the software or the user entered an URL. The SQL classes can cache prepared statements for faster performance in tight loops.
Finally we updated CURL library to version 7.79.1, DynaPDF to 4.0.63.161, LibXL to 4.0 and SQLAPI to 5.1.7.
See
release notes for a complete list of changes.
16. November 2021 - Monkeybread Software veröffentlicht heute das
MBS FileMaker Plugin für FileMaker in Version 11.5, mit inzwischen über 6600 Funktionen eines der größten FileMaker Plugins überhaupt. Hier einige der Neuerungen:
Für diese Version haben wir unsere
WebView Funktionen neu geschrieben, um mit WebViewern zu arbeiten, die Microsoft Edge/Chromium als Engine verwenden. Um die neuen Plugin-Funktionen zu nutzen, benötigen Sie den kommenden FileMaker Pro in Version 19.4. Auf dem Weg dorthin haben wir eine
WebView.ShowDevTools Funktion zum Anzeigen des Inspektors und neue Einstellungen für die
WebView.SetPreferences Funktion. Wenn Sie noch den Internet Explorer benötigen, können Sie die Funktion
WebView.CreateWithControl verwenden, um einen Plugin-basierten WebViewer mit dieser älteren Engine zu erstellen.
Unsere neuen
WebHook Funktionen ermöglichen es Ihnen, einen winzigen Web-Server direkt in FileMaker Pro, Server oder iOS SDK-basierten Anwendungen zu betreiben, um Rückrufe von Webdiensten abzufangen. Ob Ihre Telefonanlage, die Türklingel oder Ihr Git-Server eine Web-Anfrage sendet, um Sie über ein Ereignis zu informieren, unser Plugin kann die Anfrage empfangen und ein Script auslösen. Wir unterstützen TLS 1.2 mit Ihrem eigenen SSL-Zertifikat und verschiedenen Optionen.
Für
DynaPDF gibt es die neuen Funktionen
DynaPDF.GetPDFVersionEx und
DynaPDF.GetInPDFVersionEx, die Details zur PDF-Version eines Imports oder des Arbeits-PDFs liefern. Wir haben unsere
DynaPDF.ConvertStyledText Funktion für gestylten Text verbessert, um besser mit Schriftarten umgehen zu können und doppelt unterstrichenen Text zu erzeugen. Die neue Funktion
DynaPDF.AddButtonImageEx2 ermöglicht die direkte Übergabe von Bilddaten aus einem Containerwert an ein Button-Control in einem PDF.
Unsere
Hotkey Funktionen wurden für macOS umgeschrieben, um lokale Hotkeys zu ermöglichen, die nicht mit globalen Hotkeys kollidieren. So können Sie eigene Hotkeys für die Verwendung im Script-Arbeitsbereich definieren.
Die Verbesserungen für Entwickler in FileMaker selbst in unserem Plugin haben einige neue Tricks gelernt: Die Beziehungsdiagrammsuche wird jetzt beim ersten Klick initialisiert, damit Sie den Dialog schneller öffnen können. Wir können jetzt Tags verwenden, um bestimmte Wörter in einer Formel einzufärben und Kommentare in einer speziellen Farbe basierend auf dem ersten Wort einfärben. Bei der Anzeige von Skript-IDs haben wir die Leistung für Benutzer mit Skriptordnern optimiert.
Wir haben
WebView.CallFunction nicht nur für Windows, sondern auch für macOS und iOS implementiert. Für MapKit gibt es die Funktionen
MapView.CoordinateForPoint und
MapView.PointForCoordinate für die Übersetzung zwischen Punkten auf dem Bildschirm und Koordinaten auf der Karte. Die neue Funktion
XML.ItemRefs hilft, eine höhere Leistung beim Durchlaufen von XML-Daten im Array-Stil zu erreichen.
Schließlich haben wir die CURL-Bibliothek auf Version 7.79.1, DynaPDF auf 4.0.63.161, LibXL to 4.0 und SQLAPI auf 5.1.5 aktualisiert.
Alle Änderungen in den
Release Notes.
You can have multiple Xojo versions installed. I currently have seven versions here, so I can verify problems with the same version as the client. And some projects are build with a specific version, so if we just fix a small thing, we rebuild with same version to no introduce any side effects with a version switch.
Xojo keeps a cache folder for each version Xojo version, so you may have something like in the picture on the right in your ~/Library/Caches/Xojo folder.
As you see, we just dropped in two plugins for the screenshot, but we did use console, desktop, iOS and web targets in two different versions. Xojo creates object files for the linker to use those plugins in the compilation process. If that works well, you only get a pre-compilation dialog every few weeks, when you may install a new plugin version.
Now if you have more than one copy of the same Xojo version on macOS, they share a cache folder. If one Xojo version belongs to a project with a few plugins and the other version has not the same plugins, the Xojo IDE will notice that the cache doesn't match the plugins folder and rebuild the cache each time you switch.
It is perfectly fine to have one plugins folder per version with different content. But if you switch one version between two plugins folder, then you see pre-compilation every time.
New in this prerelease of version 11.5 of the MBS FileMaker Plugin:
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/files/Prerelease/, in
Dropbox folder or ask for being added to the dropbox shared folder.
New in this prerelease of the 21.5 plugins:
Download:
monkeybreadsoftware.com/xojo/download/plugin/Prerelease/ or
from Dropbox.
Or ask us to be added to our shared Dropbox folder.
If you need to copy a folder with files recursively to another location, you may just call our Files.CopyFile function. Beside the function having file in the name, it does copy folder hierarchies. But sometimes you need to do something special, like only copy some files (e.g. hidden ones), skip over errors or not copy all folders. For this case we can write a script to do the copy process recursively and allow you to customize it.
First we show you the calling script, which passes source and destination path as part of a JSON object:
# CopyFolder in file FileOperation
Set Variable [ $SourcePath ; Value: FileOperation::SourcePath ]
Set Variable [ $DestPath ; Value: FileOperation::DestinationPath ]
#
Set Variable [ $json ; Value: "{}" ]
Set Variable [ $json ; Value: MBS( "JSON.AddStringToObject"; $json; "SourcePath"; $SourcePath ) ]
Set Variable [ $json ; Value: MBS( "JSON.AddStringToObject"; $json; "DestPath"; $DestPath ) ]
#
Perform Script [ Specified: From list ; “CopyFolder Recursive” ; Parameter: $json ]
Set Variable [ $$result ; Value: Get(ScriptResult) ]
#
Show Custom Dialog [ "done" ; $$result ]
(more)
Did you know that you can extract and analyze images from a PDF file with DynaPDF? For this you can use the function DynaPDF.GetImage. In the parameters you can specify which information you want to get for an image. You can choose between the following values:
| BufSize |
The size of the image buffer in bytes. |
| BufSize |
The size of the image buffer in bytes. |
| Buffer |
The image data as JPEG or FILE. |
| Picture |
The image as a picture container. Either JPEG or TIFF. |
| Filter |
The format of image:
Required decode filter if the image is compressed. Possible values are dfDCTDecode (JPEG), dfJPXDecode (JPEG2000), and dfJBIG2Decode. Other filters are already removed by DynaPDF since a conversion to a native file format is then always required. |
| OrgFilter |
The image was compressed with this filter in the PDF file. This info is useful to determine which compression filter should be used when creating a new image file from the image buffer. |
| BitsPerPixel |
Bit depth of the image buffer. Possible values are 1, 2, 4, 8, 24, 32, and 64. |
| ColorSpace |
The color space refers either to the image buffer or to the color table if set. |
| NumComponents |
The number of components stored in the image buffer. |
| MinIsWhite |
If 1, the colors of 1 bit images are reversed. |
| ColorCount |
The number of colors in the color table. |
| Width |
Image width in pixel. |
| Height |
Image height in pixel. |
| ScanLineLength |
The length of a scanline in bytes. |
| InlineImage |
If 1, the image is an inline image. |
| Interpolate |
If 1, image interpolation should be performed. |
| Transparent |
The meaning is different depending on the bit depth and whether a color table is available.
If the image is a 1 bit image and if no color table is available, black pixels must be drawn with the current fill color. If the image contains a color table, ColorMask contains the range of indexes in the form min/max index which should appear transparent. If no color table is present ColorMask contains the transparent ranges in the form min/max for every color component. |
| Intent |
The rendering intent. Default is none. |
| MetadataSize |
Length of Metadata in bytes. |
| ResolutionX |
Image resolution on the x-axis. |
| ResolutionY |
Image resolution on the y-axis. |
| Metadata |
Optional XML Metadata stream as text. |
| ICCProfile |
ICC Color Profile of the colorspace (can be empty). |
| MaskImage |
If set, a 1 bit image is used as a transparency mask. Returns index of that image. |
| SoftMask |
If set, a grayscale image is used as alpha channel. Returns index of that image. |
| FillColor |
The current fill color. An image mask is drawn with the current fill color. |
| FillColorSpace |
The color space in which FillColor is defined. |
(more)
Check out the FMTraining.tv website. Richard Carlton and his team do a daily free live stream about FileMaker to watch. And they have a huge library of FileMaker training material to watch and learn all about the Claris FileMaker product family.
A few days ago Christian Schmitz from Monkeybread Software joined a live episode to talk a bit about the MBS FileMaker Plugin. Watch it on YouTube.
We talk a bit about what's new in MBS FileMaker Plugin in the upcoming version 11.5 and answer user questions.
Do you like this video?
Please let Richard know and send him your wishes or ideas for future live broadcast as well as topics for training videos. And check out the FileMaker Training bundles as well as their new book for FileMaker, updated for 2021.
If you work a lot with variants, you may more often than needed, create or destroy variants on the way, often without noticing. Not every developer knows that assigning something to CellTag() or adding something to dictionary may create a new variant object. If you know the little details, you may notice it.
If you have a dictionary with strings as keys and values, you may have a loop like this:
for each key as string in dic.keys
dim value as string = dic.Value(key)
System.DebugLog "key: "+value
next
What do you don’t see is the implicit conversions happening. For each step of the loop, the key is queried as variant. Since a string is needed, the StringValue function gets called to get the string value of the variant. If this is a variant containing a string, this is just a reference count +1 and returning the string. But if this is a number, it will call a ToString function internally and create a new string here.
(more)
New in this prerelease of version 11.5 of the MBS FileMaker Plugin:
Download at
monkeybreadsoftware.com/filemaker/files/Prerelease/, in
Dropbox folder or ask for being added to the dropbox shared folder.
For this year's Thanksgiving in America, we offer again discounted licenses for our MBS Plugins for FileMaker and Xojo.
